The following description relates to page layout templates, for example, portal page layout templates.
A portal brings together various applications from an intranet and an extranet that may or may not be related to one another. Traditional portal software products have included portal development tools that allow creation of portal templates to be used at portal run-time to generate portal pages for display. Run-time portal templates, such as may be implemented using Java Server Pages (JSP) and custom tag libraries, provide an efficient way to combine static data with dynamic run-time data for presentation to a user in a portal environment.
Portal development tools can be used to edit portal pages and tailor a portal to an organization and its information technology (IT) environment. Editing portal pages generally involves placing content components on the pages. In conventional portal development tools, this editing occurs in a user interface (UI) that provides a schematic representation of a portal page, including a schematic list of containers that hold run-time content. One important consideration while editing a portal page is its exact run-time appearance. Matters such as components' actual sizes, reciprocal relations between content components' appearances, and interaction between content components and other HTML (HyperText Markup Language) elements on the page, are typically taken into consideration. Traditionally, a run-time portal template is generated and used in a full run-time environment, with backend systems connected to provide run-time content, in order to test the actual run-time appearance of a portal page.